He seems to have done something that we very, very rarely see in corporate america, which is show genuine leadership. I'm wondering, keidian, what you believe you would have done that would have been less "really crappy." Genuinely interested.
Honestly? Doing a mass layoff will suck regardless, but doing it by shutting down the company and making a brand new one immediately rubs me the wrong way. While no one likes to be laid off, I think people would have been able to at least hold their head high about the work they had been doing rather than the stigma of being remembered as working at OnLive before AND being out of a job.
Side note: Wonder just how low my karma will sink after this post and my original one lol. Seems like people don't agree with me, which is fine :)
The shutting down/new company business is essentially a convoluted form of bankruptcy[0] that allowed them to keep the lights on; out of context it looks bad but it could have been much worse.
I don't know the full situation, but if each of those who were laid off owned part of the company it seems a little unfair for the majority shareholder to be able to sell the company to himself, leaving everyone else with nothing. What should have happened is that the company should go up for auction and the proceeds split by percentage owned.
They didn't own stock in the company. They had stock options which were cancelled. Which is just as well maybe since they would have also owned a piece of the debt.
So, you believe they should have just gone bankrupt, liquidated, and left everyone out of a job? I'm trying to parse your response to see what you would have done, and it seems that the part that upsets you is the "shutting down the company and making a brand new one immediately" - I'm wondering whether you would have preferred just shutting everything down? From my reading, it appears they were out of cash.
Putting the firm on sale earlier and saving the jobs or negotiating a decent severance package would be my idea of leadership. This is charity - worthy as far as it goes, but reactive rather than being out in front of the company's problem.
Why do you have doubts about this guy being "genuine?" I've seen executives in similar positions (close to liquidation, or at liquidation) - and almost without exception, all they thought about was themselves. The one exception I know of was when Jim Barksdale reached into his own pockets to help out the employees who lost their jobs at Webvan.
